The Chinese Shawl (20 page)

Laura woke up in the dark. It was very dark indeed, because though one of the windows was open the black-out curtain hung across it and no light came through. She did not know what had waked her, but she came up out of sleep with a sense of fear pressing hard upon her and only just escaped. Fear—blind, formless, dreadfully unknown—it hammered at her brain, her heart, her pulses. There was no other sound in the room.

She sat up stiffly in the bed, listening, trying to steady herself, and moment by moment the dark tide ebbed away, leaving her Laura Fane again, in control, instead of a hunted thing without a name driven by a nameless fear.

The relief was very great, but her throat was dry and her body shaken. She got out of bed, felt her way to the wash-stand, and poured a glass of water from the carafe. Its icy coldness made her shiver, but it steadied her. She set the glass back and went to the door, walking barefoot on the carpet, feeling before her with her hands. It was in her mind to turn the key in the lock, though why she could not have told, because the fear had been in her own mind, in a dream she had forgotten. It had come up with her out of her sleep, and it was gone. Why then should it be in her mind to lock the door of her room? She had no answer to this, but all at once she opened the door and looked out.

After the even velvet darkness inside the room the passage with its one light burning at the far end seemed really bright.

She looked to the right, and saw the wide corridor spacious and empty. She looked to the left, and saw Agnes Fane come from the gallery leading to the stairs.

The fear returned. It caught at her heart and held her immovable. She could not have moved for her very life, but she did not know why. Except that she was seeing what she was not meant to see—what no one was meant to see. Because Agnes Fane was walking. She was on her feet and walking, unbelievably tall. Her left foot dragged in an ugly limp. It was as if she fought the drag and defied it, for her body remained erect. She came so slowly that if Laura could have moved she might have drawn back into the safe darkness of her room and locked the door. Only she could not move. She could only stand and wait whilst Agnes Fane came on.

As she drew nearer, Laura saw her face like a white mask, her hair still orderly, her pearls about her throat, a loose gown wrapping her, purple or purplish red. Her dark eyes blazed. They came to Laura and rested there. She put a hand to the wall and stood looking down from that great height of hers. When she spoke her voice was low and harsh.

“What are you doing out of bed?”

There was a compulsion on Laura to speak, and to speak the truth. She said, “I was afraid.”

Agnes Fane looked at her, not with scorn or anger, but with a cold, alien look. She said,

“What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know.”

The look changed a little, and the voice became harsher.

“Go back to bed! And lock your door—both doors! Perhaps you can lock fear out—who knows. Go back to your bed and stay there! Do you hear?”

Stiffly, Laura obeyed, moved from the threshold, stepped back into the room, leaned upon the door with the flat of her hand until it closed, turned the key in the lock. From the other side of the door there was the sound of a long sighing breath. The dragging step went past.

Laura groped to the bathroom door and locked that too, groped for the bedside switch and put on the light, got back into bed, and lay there shuddering with cold, and something more than cold. She did not know that she had been near her death, but the nearness chilled her to the bone.

Presently she grew warmer. She felt for the hot-water bottle and drew it up beside her. The light from the bedside lamp made a comfortable glow in the room. The dream was gone, the fear was gone. She could begin to wonder at them now, and to wonder at herself for being afraid.

And then, as she looked towards the door, she saw the handle move. Instantly the terror was beating at her heart again. The handle turned quite silently until it could turn no more. Then it stopped. There was the faintest of faint sounds as pressure came upon the lock—hardly a sound at all. Perhaps she had only imagined it. Perhaps there had not really been a sound. The handle slipped round again and moved no more.

Laura sat up in bed, a hand on either side of her pressing the mattress down. She watched the door and strained to listen, but she could hear nothing. She kept saying to herself in a horrified inner whisper, “The doors are locked. The bathroom door is locked. This door is locked. Nobody can get in.” And then, behind her on the left, there came a tapping on the bathroom door.

She was out of bed and on her feet in a moment. The tapping came again, faint but insistent. Standing with her hand on the jamb, bending to the crack between it and the door, she said,

“Who’s there?”

She had never felt so much relief in all her life as she did when Lucy Adams’ fretful voice came to her ear.

“Are you awake? Let me in! Why do you lock your door?”

Laura turned the key with a shaking hand. But it was relief that made it shake. All that horrible fear—and then Cousin Lucy.

She opened the door, and Lucy Adams came in in a red flannel dressing-gown with the gold chain of her pince-nez pinned to it. It was, as usual, crooked. The auburn front was presumably on her dressing-table. Its absence revealed a wide, thin parting, and scanty locks done up in metal curlers. She wore a worried expression, and spoke in a whisper.

“It is Agnes—she is ill. Why did you lock your door? I don’t approve of it. Suppose there was a fire. Your Cousin Agnes is ill, and I could not make you hear. We must get the doctor at once. You must help me.”

Laura caught up her green dressing-gown and slipped it on.

“What’s the matter? Is she very ill? What do you want me to do?”

Lucy Adams jerked at her pince-nez.

“She has these attacks. They are very alarming. She cannot be left. Perry is with her. I must go down and telephone for the doctor, but I can’t do it alone. It’s all been such a shock. I can’t go down there alone. You must come with me.”

The wind blew in from the open window. Laura went over and shut it. She was shivering as she came back.

“Of course I’ll come down with you. But wouldn’t you like me to call Miss Silver, or Carey?”

“No—no—no—no! You mustn’t do that! Nobody must know. They are strangers—we mustn’t bring them in. I came to you because you are family. We’ve got to keep it in the family. Nobody else must know.”

Her looked darted at Laura and dropped away again. Her voice shook nervously.

“No one outside the family,” she repeated.

“And the doctor—”

Miss Adams jerked impatiently.

“Doctors don’t count—they can keep a secret. And we must hurry. Put on your slippers and come!”

As they went down into the dimly lighted hall, Laura was wondering, and trying not to wonder, about this illness of Agnes Fane’s. “One of her attacks—” What kind of attack? “We must keep it in the family. Nobody must know—” What was there to know? “Doctors can keep a secret—” What secret was there to be kept? An echo of her own sick fear came to her, and she remembered the dragging limp, the white mask of a face, the voice that had told her to lock her door.

At the foot of the stairs Lucy Adams turned, speaking low. “You had better wait here. There is no need for you to hear what I have to tell the doctor. But you won’t go away?”

Laura shook her head. She was puzzled. She felt a shrinking embarrassment. But she was not frightened now. It did not frighten her to stay alone in the hall whilst Lucy Adams went into Tanis’s sitting-room and shut the door. It might have frightened her if she had known that Florrie Mumford was lying dead across the threshold of the study not so very far away. But she did not know.

She leaned against the newel-post, shivering a little, and hoping that Cousin Lucy wouldn’t be long. From where she stood she could just hear the murmur of her voice.

Then the door opened. Miss Adams stood there beckoning, the lighted room behind her. Laura obeyed reluctantly. Wouldn’t they go upstairs again now? It appeared that they would not. Cousin Lucy drew her in and pushed the door to.

“We must wait down here for him and let him in. I was quite right to send for him, and he will come at once. Such a relief! I said I would be here to let him in. I may not hear the car, but you will, I am sure. I am not deaf, you know, but I do not hear quite so well as I used to. Now you sit down over there on the sofa, and I will take this chair. The doctor will not be long.”

Laura sat down on the couch at the farther side of the hearth. It was wide, and deep, and low. She pulled a cushion down and leaned against it. Across the hearth, incongruous in a squat wide-armed chair, Miss Adams sat stiffly upright in her red flannel dressing-gown and her tight metal curlers. Behind her the door to the hall, not actually ajar, but not quite latched. As a little thing will sometimes stick in one’s thought and prick at it, this trifle caught Laura’s attention, and pricked there. If she had not felt so tired she would have gone over to the door to latch it properly.

She heard Lucy Adams say just in her usual rambling voice,

“You realize of course that it was your Cousin Agnes who shot Tanis.”

Laura felt exactly as if someone had hit her sharply and suddenly. The impact made her blink. She stared at Lucy and said nothing.

Miss Adams said in an exasperated tone,

“Really, Laura, you can be very stupid! Didn’t you hear what I said?”

Laura moved stiff lips and said,

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you say something? It seems to me that my remark called for some comment.”

It seemed to Laura that comment was impossible. What do you say when one elderly relative who is sensibly attired in red flannel tells you point blank that another elderly relative is a homicidal maniac? For that was what it amounted to. The attacks which must not be witnessed by a stranger—“We must keep it in the family… A doctor knows how to keep a secret.”—all these things meant one thing and one thing only, that Cousin Agnes was mad, and that in a fit of mania she had killed Tanis Lyle. She heard Lucy Adams say,

“Of course she did not mean to kill Tanis. It was a most unfortunate accident. She meant to kill you.”

A kind of stiffness invaded Laura, mind and body. It rendered her incapable of speech or movement. Behind Lucy Adams she saw the sitting-room door move in an inch or two, and move again—four—five—six inches. She wondered why it had moved.

Miss Silver opened her eyes upon the darkness of her bedroom. She did not know what had waked her from the uneasy sleep into which she had fallen. She thought it was a sound. She listened, and could hear nothing. She therefore sat up in bed and listened again. Unbroken silence, unbroken darkness.

She switched on her bedside lamp and drew about her shoulders, a large knitted shawl with an openwork border.

The new stitch which she had been trying out had not proved very successful. She had not, therefore, given the shawl away to the baby for whom it had been intended, her niece Letty’s second child, but had kept it for herself. She found it warm and comfortable now.

The minutes slipped away. If there had been a sound, it was not repeated. She decided that she was becoming fanciful—she had sat too late and thought too long. Tomorrow would be a painful and difficult day. She must really try to get a little sleep. But the desire for sleep had left her. She took a book at random from the bedside table and began to read.

Actually, it was the sound of Florrie Mumford’s fall which had roused her, her room being over the study.

She read for about twenty minutes, and found at the end of this time that she had not the slightest recollection of what she had been reading. Whilst her eyes perused the printed page, her thoughts wandered towards strange conjectures and horrifying conclusions. They reached a point where she could no longer pretend to read.

In her usual controlled manner she replaced the book, got out of bed, and put on a warm grey dressing-gown industriously trimmed with wide crochet borders of crimson wool. No garment could possibly have been less becoming, but it was warm and serviceable, and it concealed every inch of the voluminous woollen nightgown beneath. When she had fastened it at the waist with a long grey cord she crossed the passage and tapped lightly upon Carey Desborough’s door. Receiving no answer, she turned the handle and went in.

The first that Carey knew about it was light slanting down on him from the lamp beside the bed. He blinked at it, and at the astonishing vision of Miss Silver with her hand upon the switch. Then he came broad awake. He sat up and said in a horrified voice,

“What is it? What’s happened?”

Miss Silver gave her slight cough.

“Nothing, I hope, Mr. Desborough. I am sorry to disturb you, but I cannot help feeling extremely uneasy. I was awakened some little time ago by a sound. That at least is my impression, but of course I may be mistaken—our minds are disturbed, and trifles are apt to be magnified. If it would not be too much trouble, I would be glad if you would make a tour of the downstairs rooms with me.”

He was out of bed and reaching for his dressing-gown.

“You thought the sound came from there?”

“That was my impression. If I was mistaken, we can return to our rooms and say nothing about it. If, on the other hand—” She got no farther, because Carey broke in.

“You’re sure it was downstairs?”

Miss Silver became a little distant.

“I am not sure about anything, Mr. Desborough. I think we had better investigate.”

They came down the stairs and into the hall. In Miss Silver’s mind the purpose of turning to the right and proceeding in the direction of the dining-room, morning-room, and study had been clearly formed, but as her foot took the last step down, this purpose dissolved. Her ear had caught the sound of a voice which she knew very well. The sound came from the left-hand side of the hall, from Tanis Lyle’s sitting-room, the door of which showed a crack of light.

She immediately touched Carey on the arm and put a finger to her lips. They stood for a moment, listening intently. Then, quite noiselessly, Miss Silver led the way to the door and, coming to it, pushed gently against it with her hand until the crack of light had become a six-inch band. In the brief preceding moment she heard Lucy Adams say,

“Of course she did not mean to kill Tanis. It was a most unfortunate accident. She meant to kill you.”